Quotes from My Ántonia

14 notable lines from Willa Cather · 1918

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

Closing line — Jim Burden, Book V

  1. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

    Jim Burden, on arriving in Nebraska, Book I

  2. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

    Jim Burden, in his grandmother's garden, Book I

  3. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.

    Jim Burden, to Ántonia, Book IV

  4. Optima dies ... prima fugit

    Virgil, Georgics III (epigraph and recurring motif)

  5. It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee.

    Jim Burden, reading Virgil's Georgics at university, Book III

  6. Primus ego in patriam mecum ... deducam Musas; for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.

    Virgil, as Jim studies him, Book III

  7. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

    Jim Burden, seeing the older Ántonia, Book V

  8. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

    Jim Burden, on the older Ántonia, Book V

  9. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

    Jim Burden, Book V

  10. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

    Jim Burden, his first night on the prairie, Book I

  11. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly.

    Ántonia, to Jim, Book IV

  12. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.

    Jim Burden, on the hired girls, Book III

  13. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be.

    Jim Burden, the closing pages, Book V